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John Travolta's latest descent into mediocrity sees him play ex-Army Ranger Tom Hardy (Travolta). His DEA agent is called out to a US military base after a training exercise goes badly wrong, leaving several soldiers injured and a hard-nosed sergeant (Samuel L. Jackson, who's obviously watched Lee Ermey in "Full Metal Jacket" too many times) with a phosphorous grenade in his back.
Asked to investigate the murder by an old acquaintance, Hardy soon finds himself drawn into a mystery in which everyone seems to have a different version of events.
Explicitly styled as an update of Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon" - in which the story of a rape and murder is told from so many different perspectives that no one is sure what the real truth is - "Basic" promises to put an intelligent spin on the usual military thriller.
If only director John McTiernan had been able to keep up with the intricacies of James ("Darkness Falls") Vanderbilt's labyrinthine script. Fumbling the setup, the "Die Hard" helmer quickly loses his grip on the material, turning "Basic" into little more than a mechanical exercise in plotting.
Unlike "The Usual Suspects", which delivered a coda of such outright chutzpah that audiences were desperate to see the film again in order to work out how they'd been duped, this movie's much-vaunted final reel twist makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Instead of leaving the auditorium asking "How did they do that?", most audiences are likely to wander out saying "Why did they do that?"
John Travolta may have shed some of the flab around his midriff for "Basic", but the film still doesn't make for pretty viewing. Will Travolta keep earning $20 million-a-movie with duds like this? Fat chance.
I like being surprised by plot twists that make sense, and this movie succeeds.
